2 NOVELISTIC DISCOURSE IN ARISTOPHANES
[…] the style of the novel is to be found in the combination of its styles; the language of the novel is the system of its “languages”. (DN, 262)
The problem of ancient novelistic prose is extremely complex. The embryonic beginnings of authentic double-voiced and double-languaged prose did not in ancient times always achieve the status of the novel, as a definite compositional and thematic structure. For the most part novelistic prose flourished in other generic formats: in realistic novellas, in satires, in some biographical and autobiographical forms, and in certain purely rhetorical genres […] in historical, and finally, in epistolary genres. In all of these forms the germs of novelistic prose can be found, that is, there is an orchestration of meaning through heteroglossia. (DN, 371)
I. INTRODUCTION
The comedies of Aristophanes would appear to have obvious points of intersection with Bakhtin's work on carnival, particularly Rabelais and His World, with its emphasis on the material bodily principle, those “images of the human body with its food, drink, defecation and sexual life” (RW, 18).1 For Aristophanic comedy foregrounds just these Rabelaisian features in its sustained appreciation of food and sex, as well as in its fascination with excretion and a full range of bodily discharges too numerous to mention.2 In this context the testimony of Bakhtin himself is surprising, for he pointedly excludes Aristophanes from his discussions of carnival in Rabelais and His World, the Dostoevsky book, and in the essays on the prehistory of the novel and the serio-comic genres of antiquity. Instead, the ever-heterodox Bakhtin privileges the genres of the Hellenistic period — Menippean satire, the sophistic novel, the mime, and Lucian, who draws heavily on Aristophanes — over works from the classical and archaic eras.
The relationship between Bakhtin's thought and Aristophanes, however, is more complex than a simple examination of the former's neglect of Old Comedy would indicate. Little in his printed work shows much direct contact with the genre after his philological training as a student, and, without exception, when Bakhtin does mention Aristophanes it is as the representative of a type of discourse rather than the writer of specific plays. Further, a look at Bakhtin's picture of the ancient world, as well as his bibliographical sources, shows that in some ways he viewed it with the eye of a primitivist, seeing the birth of literary forms as the end-product of ritual practices. Central to this view is his idea of ancient carnival culture as reflecting a cycle of life, death and rebirth. Although Bakhtin uses such terms in various ways, not all of them literal, it seems clear that he regards carnival and, more importantly, the literature derived from it, as reflecting actual, cult activities.3 Thus he cites with approval the work of Cambridge School classicist Francis Cornford, whose speculations in The Origin of Attic Comedy, though largely discredited now in the form in which they were originally formulated, were very influential in the early part of the century.4 Cornford's reductive understanding of comedy, which saw it as a fertility ritual expressing the alternation of summer and winter, the old year and the new year, etc., had the effect of privileging older, more “primitive” expressions of ancient culture as more authentic than their literary successors. This emphasis on ritual with its nostalgic evocation of the lost past is certainly characteristic of Bakhtin's understanding of the origins of carnival. It also forms a major part of his strategy for defending the laughter of Rabelais and the stylistic heterogeneity of the novel, both of which he attempts to naturalize by assimilating them to their roots in folk culture. Thus this preliterary period of ritualized carnival represents the Golden Age of laughter for Bakhtin. From such a perspective, therefore, subsequent cultural developments can only represent a decline in purity. The putative chronology of this process is expressed most completely in “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”:
As class society develops further and as ideological spheres are increasingly differentiated, the internal disintegration (bifurcation) of each element of the matrix becomes more and more intense: food, drink, the sexual act in their real aspect enter personal everyday life […]. The gross realities of the ancient pre-class complex — which had all been equally valid — are disassociated from each other and undergo an internal bifurcation and sharp hierarchical reinterpretation. In ideologies and in literature the elements of the matrix are scattered throughout various planes, high and low, and throughout various genres, styles, tones. They do not come together in a single context. They do not line up with one another since the all-embracing whole has been lost. (FTC, 213)
For this reason the comedies of Aristophanes cannot occupy a privileged position within Bakhtin's literary canon. Whatever characteristics of carnivalized literature they do possess must represent only vestiges of the authentic ritual laughter they have supplanted and would contrast markedly with the “literariness” of comedy's fifth-century form.5 This attitude has direct implications for the argument of the Rabelais book. If Bakhtin is to argue for the ontological priority of Rabelais on the basis of his direct indebtedness to the earliest, i.e. the most natural, human social behavior (thereby legitimizing the standing of Rabelais' novel vis-à-vis the other genres), he is compelled to minimize the contribution of the intermediary forms of literature that separate Rabelais from the “ancient matrix” of ritual death and rebirth.6 The result is a teleological interpretation of literary history culminating in Rabelais, whose novel alone is presented as the re-embodiment of carnival laughter. The cost of this strategic move, however, is high, for it causes Bakhtin to blur the outlines of his subject, and therefore to miss important elements within it.
Bakhtin's dismissal of Aristophanes within his “history of laughter” may also be explained by his focus on the subversive, antinomian character of carnival laughter and its temporary disruption of the ideology of the prevailing regime. Certainly from a perspective that privileges all that is anarchic and incomplete, the text of Aristophanes is less obviously carnivalistic. For all their indecency, the comedies are products of the Athenian imperial regime, conceived, administered, and promoted under its laws, and contributing to its self-understanding as a unique polis (Goldhill 1991, 167–222; Henderson 1990). Given the unabashedly civic context of Aristophanic comedy's origins and dissemination, Bakhtin's neglect of it in his “history of laughter” is less surprising. In any event, Aristophanes and the entire tradition of Old Comedy are closely integrated into the institutional structure of fifth-century Athens, and for this reason might seem of a different order than the disruptive, unofficial language of carnival as understood by Bakhtin.
Bakhtin's emphasis on the ritual underpinnings of carnival laughter often makes it difficult to apply his explicit formulations of carnival culture to Aristophanic comedy; nor does he seem to appreciate the stylistic diversity and heterogeneous linguistic consciousness that informs the entire Aristophanic corpus. In fact, this consciousness is fully dialogic, and employs a wide range of idiolects and social languages in the service of its comic ends. Indeed, I will argue that this aspect of Aristophanic comedy is so striking and significant that we should focus less on Aristophanes as a precursor of Rabelaisian carnival and see him more as an important, though neglected, part of the history of “novelistic discourse”. It is true that Bakhtin would deny this claim, maintaining that genres like Menippean satire and the Hellenistic Greek novel are the most authentic precursors of the modern novel to be found in the ancient world. Nevertheless, even granting this genealogical thesis, it is possible to argue that Greek Old Comedy — and Aristophanes in particular as its only surviving practitioner — occupies for classical antiquity a position homologous to that of the modern novel as described by Bakhtin.7
I will begin by discussing the idea of carnival as Bakhtin develops it, along with his related concept of the carnivalization of literary genres. Next, I will examine Bakhtin's explicit statements about ancient comedy in general, and about Aristophanes in particular, to show more explicitly how the ritual focus of his analysis of carnival, as well as his stress on its antinomian aspects, make it difficult for him to recognize Aristophanes' extraordinary place within the history of heteroglot, intertextual discourse. I will continue by reading Aristophanes through the lens of Bakhtin's work on the novel, particularly “Discourse in the Novel” and “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse”, concluding with a look at tragic parody in the Acharnians and an exemplary fragment from Aristophanes' lost play, the Banqueters.
II. ARISTOPHANES AND CARNIVAL
On the level of individual artistic achievement we have, in Aristophanes' image, the evolution of an ancient sacral mask in a vivid shorthand (a sort of philogeny [sic] recapitulating ontogeny), from its primitive, purely cultic significance to the private, everyday type of commedia dell' arte […]. (FTC. 219)
CARNIVAL AND CARNIVALISTIC
The idea of carnival and its relationship to literature, particularly to the literary tradition out of which the novel emerges, is significant for all of Bakhtin's work from the 1930s and 1940s, during which time the essays that comprise The Dialogic Imagination were composed, as well as the dissertation that would become Rabelais and His World. This notion also figures prominently in his revision of Problems of Dostoevski's Poeties, published in 1963 as part of an expanded fourth chapter on the structure of the adventure plot, and reoccurs even in some of his last work.8 Yet like many key Bakhtinian concepts, carnival does not always mean the same thing, even within the same text. Two basic senses of the term predominate: 1) carnival as a human activity displayed in the public, popular culture of the marketplace, fairs and celebrations, and 2) carnival as the application of this consciousness to literature, whether contemporary, as in the medieval parodies to which Bakhtin frequently refers, or later developments that make use of the carnival spirit, the so-called “carnivalization of literature” (PDP, 122, 127, 131, and passim; see also Morson and Emerson 1990, 460–463).
Both senses of carnival assume a primordial split between official and unofficial, and have at their center the idea of an unofficial folk consciousness that maintains a critical distance from official ideologies.9 This distance is created and maintained primarily through a manipulation of language that serves to undermine the otherwise centripetal tendencies of normal political and social life by privileging a multitude of “languages”, as opposed to those singular tongues in which official culture expresses itself (DN, 273). The central tactic employed here is parody, which by mocking the language of official discourses exposes their contingency (Morson 1989, 78–79). Bakhtin here refers to the parodic transmutation of the entire ideological apparatus of authority into the physical realities of human life: food and drink, sex, fertility, life, death, and rebirth. Here the official order is unmasked and seen for what it is, transitory and contingent. Thus, by connecting parodic language to the grotesque image of the body, Bakhtin is able to account not only for carnival's political position as an oblique challenge to the world of approved ideologies and institutions, but also for its characteristic material bodily focus.10
Bakhtin refers to the process by which the ancient aspects of carnival were reinterpreted on a literary plane as the “carnivalization of the genres”. Derived from his model of carnival as an anarchic social force, it figures most prominently in the second edition of Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and represents the literary face of carnival (Morson and Emerson 1990, 436–141). As carnival subverts the voice of the ruling regime or institution, so carnivalized literature undermines the absolute authority of isolationist genres (like epic in Bakhtin's model) that take themselves seriously (PDP, 107). For the early Modern period it is Rabelais who embodies the carnivalistic spirit for Bakhtin, just as the “reduced laughter” of Dostoevsky is its nineteenth-century equivalent. As he is quick to point out, however, the tradition of carnivalized literature has its roots in antiquity in the genres of serio-comical literature (EN, 21–22). Like the carnival spirit from which they derive, the serio-comic genres are oppositional, though primarily on a literary plane. As was the case with carnival in general, these genres have a special relationship to parody. This, too, distinguishes them from the genres against which they orient themselves (PDP, 127). Thus, according to Bakhtin, from carnival in general to the carnivalized literary genres there is an unbroken continuity stretching back far into the past and continuing to appear, if in a “reduced” form, in later periods.
Bakhtin outlines three basic characteristics of serio-comic, carnivalized literature in the second edition of the Dostoevsky book. First, in contrast to the orientation of epic and tragedy in the direction of the valorized past, the serio-comic genres are contemporary and on the same level as their objects of representation (PDP, 108; see also EN, 22). Indeed, it is this egalitarian impulse that allows them to function in the critical spirit discussed above, as Bakhtin makes clear (EN, 27). Second, serio-comic genres maintain their emphasis on the present by avoiding the mythological past: “the genres of the serio-comical do not rely on legend and do not sanctify themselves through it […] their relationship to legend is in most cases deeply critical and at times even resembles a cynical exposé” (PDP, 108)11. By identifying in serio-comic genres a lack of dependence on legend, Bakhtin situates them squarely in opposition to genres like epic and tragedy as he understood them. For him the epic past is absolute and its relationship with its subject matter virtually unmediated (EN, 16; see also 13). In the Iliad, for example, the Trojan War is an event of the remote past, from the perspective of both audience and narrator. The epic narrator does not contemporize the story, evaluate it, or suggest analogies between it and the present day. The story, as well as its narration, is treated as relatively unproblematic. In contrast, the serio-comic genres relentlessly contemporize and subject even the mythological past to their evaluation.12
Bakhtin's final characteristic of serio-comic genres is stylistic, and provides the clearest linkage between carnivalized literature and the beginnings of novelistic prose:
Characteristic of these genres are a multi-toned narration, the mixing of high and low, serious and comic; they make wide use of inserted genres — letters, found manuscripts, retold dialogues, parodies on the high genres, parodically reinterpreted citations; in some of them we observe a mixing of prosaic and poetic speech, living dialects and jargons […] are introduced, and various authorial masks make their appearance. (PDP, 108; see also PND, 50–51)
In “Epic and Novel” Bakhtin makes explicit the connection between this type of stylistic heterogeneity and the development of the novel: “These serio-comic genres were the first authentic and essential strain in the evolution of the novel as the genre of becoming” (EN, 22). The use of heteroglossia, Bakhtin's term for the rejection of stylistic unity and the incorporation into a work of “heterogeneous stylistic unities” (DN, 261), is, according to Bakhtin, a key component of the novel and its predecessors.13
Moreover, this heteroglossia is organically linked to the first two characteristics of camivalized literature: contemporaneity and the dissolution of epic distance.14 From a literary perspective it is the third characteristic, however, that is decisive. Novelistic heteroglossia brings about a disruption of the normal discourses, political or literary. The result is greater disorder but more freedom (EN, 6–7). Heteroglossia prevents closure. By introducing into a text voices “other” than that of a single authorial presence, and by refusing to give them a hierarchical position within its purview, an author brings about a situation where incommensurable discourses compete within the text. None is allowed the luxury of solitude. “Here”, says Bakhtin, “the dialogic nature of heteroglossia is revealed and actualized; languages become implicated in each other and mutually annihilate each other” (DN, 410; see also EN, 5).
The carnivalization of literature, therefore, effected by the interanimating presence of multiple, independent languages, results in ongoing linguistic change through cross-fertilization, on the level of everyday speech as well as in more rarefied professional, social and literary contexts. The serio-comic literature that embodies this heteroglossia anticipates the dynamic stimulus of the novel. For Bakhtin, these genres were almost coeval with the beginnings of Western civilization itself. It remains to be examined what role is played in this process by Aristophanes and the entire tradition of Old Comedy.
BAKHTIN AND ARISTOPHANES
Readers of Aristophanes have understandably seized upon the above features which Bakhtin attributes to carnivalized literature and to the tradition of novelistic prose as characteristic of Aristophanic comedy, and have sought to extend the application of Bakhtin's model in that direction. Such features of Aristophanic comedy as its unrestrained obscenity, its self-conscious mixture of styles, its tragic parody, its relentless obsession with food and the presence of spoudogeloion, the quality that for Bakhtin gives laughter its philosophical, liberating aspect, all have distinct parallels in the “carnivalistic” mode of discourse described above. Recent studies about comedy assume this parallel, and for good reason (Rosen 1988, 5–6; Rösier 1986). There exists, therefore, a strong prima facie case for the inclusion of Aristophanes within Bakhtin's tradition of carnival laughter, and it is clear that his model is useful for accounting for the co-presence of many of the features of Old Comedy.
Nevertheless, Aristophanes is conspicuously absent from Bakhtin's account of the precursors of Rabelais and from his “prehistory of the novel”. To be sure, he occasionally acknowledges the position of Aristophanes within this tradition. Thus in the Dostoevsky book he mentions without discussion that “early Attic Comedy and the entire realm of the serio-comical was subjected to a particularly powerful carnivalization” (PDP, 129). In general, however, he seems uneasy about Aristophanes' position within this genealogy and downplays the significance of Aristophanic comedy for the history of carnivalized literature (RW, 98 n. 42; see also FTC, 219’220).
Bakhtin's examples of serio-comic literature are drawn instead from the Hellenistic period, when the focus of Greek intellectual and literary life ceased to be Athens and spread to other lands, and eventually to Rome, whose bilingual culture is emphasized by Bakhtin (PND, 61). This bilinguaiism, one of the characteristics of what Bakhtin describes as polyglossia, “fully frees consciousness from the tyranny of its own language and its own myth of language. Parodic-travestying forms flourish under these conditions, and only in this milieu are they capable of being elevated to completely new ideological heights” (PND, 61). Bakhtin's teleological bent and his assumption of Hellenistic/Roman literature's centrality in the history of novelistic consciousness leads him to portray previous ages as preparatory for it. He is fully aware that the monoglossia of any historical period is at best an impulse, and never truly realized (DN, 279; see also PND, 66 and RW, 121). Nevertheless, he locates an important avatar of this monoglottic consciousness in, among other places, fifth-century Athens, which he sees as characterized by a “harmony of the genres” (EN, 4).
Bakhtin's tendency to reconstruct the history of a phenomenon on the basis of a perceived teleology locates him squarely within the tradition of Aristotelian criticism. Indeed, Stephen Halliwell's description of The Poetics as “ostensible literary history […] so theory-laden, so heavily grounded in a priori and philosophical assumptions about poetry, that it can only be judged to offer a historical account in a severely qualified form” (1986, 255) could be applied with equal validity to Bakhtin's work. Holquist, moreover, describes history in Bakhtin “as a kind of Bildungsroman, […] a kind of collective biography from prehistory to the present” (1990, 73). If this characterization is accurate, it is unsurprising that Bakhtin's picture of the ancient world and, in particular, of the classical period is eccentrically accented. At the same time, his model is not useless simply because it operates exclusively on the level of abstraction. Indeed, it is certain that the major reorganizations of life that took place in the Hellenistic period did significantly affect the production of literature, and the conditions of its dissemination and consumption. Moreover, literary production in the Hellenistic period also became further removed from the practices of ritual culture organically rooted in the traditions of communal Greek life. Nevertheless, by understating the linguistic diversity of classical genres, the reductiveness of Bakhtin's model tends to undermine its claims about the Hellenistic genres it seeks to explicate.
It is fitting that Bakhtin's model of history should be compared to a literary genre. In the context of the present discussion of comedy and the carnivalesque, however, one might say that comparing Bakhtin's view of history to the Bildungsroman, a genre of linear development, obscures an important feature of his thought, its emphasis on the movement of carnival time, with its cyclical alternation of decline and renewal. If we apply the carnival model to Bakhtin's history of genres, we realize that the classical period is not only important as the rigid standard from which the seriocomic Hellenistic genres derive; but it is equally important as marking laughter's temporary devolution from what Bakhtin regards as the unrestricted freedom of original, preliterate carnival laughter.15 The existence of the harmonious, i.e. not carnivalized, interaction of the genres of the classical period implies the existence of a prior period of preliterary discourse characterized by the recurring voice of carnival laughter as an expression of authentic folk consciousness. The hypothetical existence of this prelapsarian folk consciousness, therefore, occupies a privileged place in the history of human experience for Bakhtin. By contrast, Aristophanes, as a literary figure, one of the epigonoi, must represent a falling away from the Golden Age of carnival consciousness unmediated by literature, a fact that may help to explain Bakhtin's neglect of him.16 The essential thrust of this cyclical evolution is illustrated by the figure below.
| CARNIVAL | >>> | LITERARY | >>> | CARNIVAL |
| Preclassical (rustic carnival) | >>> | Classical (Aristophanes) | >>> | Hellenistic (seriocomic polyglossia) |
| Preliterary Folk Base | >>> | Literary, Folk Base Attenuated Devolution of Laughter | >>> | Decay of Classical Literary Culture, Reassertion of Carnival Laughter |
III. ARISTOPHANES IN “THE HISTORY OF LAUGHTER”
Le comique, encmi dcs soupirs et des pleurs, N'admets point dans ses verses de tragiques doleurs.
(Boileau, Ars poétique)
A character is but one of the forms a speaking person might assume […] Heteroglot languages may also enter the novel in the form of impersonal parodied stylizations, […J or in the form of (relatively non-parodic) stylizations, or in the form of inserted genres, posited authors or skaz. (DN, 335)
We have seen the difficulties involved in reading Aristophanes from the perspective of Bakhtin's model of carnival. What I shall argue instead is that the claims Bakhtin makes about the harmony of classical genres are overstated, and that their interaction is in fact quite complex. Far more than any other genre, Aristophanic comedy is the instigator of this generic interaction and in the classical period is foremost in the deployment of both literary and extraliterary heteroglossia. In this, as Bakhtin recognized, it mimics the very processes at work in language itself:
At any given moment of its evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word (according to formal linguistic markers, especially phonetic) but also, and for us this is the essential point, into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, “professional” and “generic” languages, languages of generations and so forth. (DN, 271–272)
The strength of the novel and the genres related to it is their ability to juxtapose language levels and competing social dialects and to sublimate them under the direction of the author (DN, 262).
This model for interpreting radical intertextuality on a sociological level has direct implications for the analysis of Aristophanic comedy. As Bakhtin notes, in archaic and classical Greece poetic genres, those embodying what he describes as the “epic” sensibility tend toward a kind of isolation (EN, 16, 27). The Greek of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey was intelligible to all, but was not spoken, even at the time of the composition of the epics, nor had it ever been. The poets of the Iliad and the Odyssey used a traditional poetic diction built out of a mixture of dialects chosen for their ability to be strung together metrically ex tempore by the oral poet in order to tell whatever story might best please their audience. This highly artificial style, as well as the extreme familiarity of the Homeric poems to Greeks, made any quotation of Homer, however obscure, easily identifiable and clearly marked.
Tragedy in the same way simultaneously expands and reduces the linguistic possibilities open to it. It uses literary Doric for its choral passages, a separate dialect with distinct differences from the Attic of everyday Athenian speech. In addition, it employs an elevated vocabulary, much of which seldom appears in prose genres.17 This special vocabulary, as in the case of Homeric Greek, is in part due to tragedy's strict interpretation of the metrical requirements of the iambic trimeter that comprises the bulk of non-choral speech, but, as the mutual critiques of Euripides and Aeschylus in Aristophanes' Frogs makes clear, tragedy also sees itself as possessing a certain grandeur reflected in its language and distinguishing it from common speech. Thus, tragedy situates itself in a kind of linguistic isolation that is intensified by its mythological subjects and almost complete avoidance of direct commentary on contemporary events. From this perspective, then, epic and tragedy could both be called genres that aim at generic isolation.18
Old Comedy, by contrast, contributes to classical Greek culture the same heterogeneity that Bakhtin claims the novel adds to the early Modern and later periods. Its language is thoroughly heteroglot in the sense that it regularly juxtaposes speech genres that are normally separate, whether those of people in everyday life like professional rhetoricians and fishmongers, or more complex secondary speech genres like tragedy and epic, which are usually insulated from the interplay of normal speech. The result of this profusion of speech genres is a combination of voices derived from the different strata of Greek society so dense that it is often impossible to make out who is “really speaking”. At the very least, the audience of Aristophanes had to be ready to shift at any time as a voice heard at one moment was forced to give way to another, sometimes within the same metrical line or clause.
One aspect of this interaction is the incorporation of tragic diction into Aristophanic comedy. This appropriation, in turn, allows Aristophanes to contest the putative authority of tragedy and to stage publicly a struggle between two genres for cultural pre-eminence. At times this battle for recognition is explicit in Aristophanes, as in the parabasis to the Birds, where the avian chorus suggests to the spectators that if they, too, were birds they could fly home for some lunch when they got bored with the tragic performances and be back in time for the comedy (785–789). Most often, however, the struggle is subterranean, played out parodically through Aristophanes' incorporation of the diction, plots and actual words of the tragedians into his comedy. Through this process of parodic co-optation, tragedy is deprived of its previous authority and of its implicit claim to offer moral paradigms through the depiction of the mythological past.
An example from the Clouds (423 BCE, later revised but never restaged) well illustrates this phenomenon. Strepsiades the Athenian, a man with a preference for the old-time morality, but one who also aspires to cheat his way out of debt, decides to send off his son Pheidippides to be educated in the art of deceptive speech by Socrates and his associates. The highlight of Pheidippides' entry into the school is a contest over who will oversee his education: the Just Speech, who represents a pederastic version of old-fashioned morality, and the Unjust Speech, who represents contemporary amoral opportunism. After the Just Speech has criticized his opponent for his lack of moderation, and for encouraging idleness and profligacy among the youth, the following conversation ensues:
Unjust Speech: Who ever made out well on account of moderation? Speak up and prove me wrong!
Just Speech: Lots of people. Well, Peleus got the sword that way.
Unjust Speech: A sword? The wretch sure got a tine reward there! Hyperbolus the lampseller got barrels of money through his shamelessness, but he sure as Hell didn't get a sword! (1061–1066)
In the context of Clouds, Achilles' father Peleus is a representative of the didactic mythological tradition embodied in tragedy that provided moral exempla for young Athenians and inculcated in them the ideological values of Athenian society. Both Sophocles and Euripides wrote plays about Peleus which are no longer extant. According to the scholiast, Sophocles' play is parodied later in the Clouds (1417): dis paides hoi gerontes (“Old men are twice children”) (= Sophocles fr. 487 Radt 1977; for the scholia see Dübner 1969. 133).19 Moreover, Aristophanes had parodied the same Sophoclean passage in greater detail a year earlier in Knights (1099; cf. Dübner 1969, 70). In addition, a fragment from Antiphanes cites Peleus as an example of a tragic hero known to all (K-A 189.21–23). It seems undeniable, therefore, that the Peleus of Clouds, who is cast as the epitome of moderation by the Just Speech and scorned by the Unjust Speech, is primarily the Peleus of tragedy, and well known to Aristophanes' audience.20 Thus in the Clouds the status of tragedy as the source of moral virtue is undercut by the ambivalent representation of Peleus as both the paragon of sophrosyne and as a benighted, somewhat unmanly hero.21
The dramatic situation surrounding this attack on Peleus is complex. While Aristophanes himself does not ridicule the mythological tradition upon which tragedy depends, nevertheless he stages scenes in which it is held up to a ridicule that is not elsewhere rebutted.22 It is true that Strepsiades' rejection of Pheidippides' new learning and his burning of Socrates' school at the end of the play represent a rejection of the sophistic learning upheld by the Unjust Speech. Nevertheless, the rejection of the new does not imply the rehabilitation of the moderation of Peleus nor that of the ancien régime he represents. In fact, both the Unjust Speech and the tradition represented by Peleus are repudiated in the course of the comedy. By staging this debunking of tragic characters, as well as their antagonists, within his own play, Aristophanes is able to position comedy (in particular his) as the only literary form with sufficient breadth to comprehend both the perspective of tragedy and that of its critics, as well as the limitations of each.23 It is here, in Aristophanes' contestation of tragedy's preeminent position in Athenian society, that Bakhtin's idea of carnival as a discourse that characteristically subverts and inverts the everyday significance of things can help us to interpret the heavily allusive language of Aristophanes. His description of the contestation of language undertaken by the novel is equally applicable to Aristophanes:
The novel […] denies the absolutism of a single and unitary language […]. It is a perception that has been made conscious of the vast plenitude of national and, more to the point, social languages — all of which arc equally capable of being “languages of truth”, but […] all of which arc equally relative, reified and limited, as they are merely the languages of social groups, professions and other cross-sections of everyday life. The novel begins by presuming a verbal and semantic decentering of the ideological world, a certain linguistic homelessness of literary consciousness. (EN, 366–367)
Just as the novel deploys its extraordinary self-consciousness to undermine the claims and pretensions of other literary and non-literary genres, so Aristophanic comedy brings on stage its own adversaries and polemicizes with them, thereby undermining their competing claims to be the “language of truth”.
I will now continue by looking briefly at a few specific examples of these comic juxtapositions from the Acharnians, attempting to give some account of the interaction between tragedy and comedy, before concluding with a reading of a particularly suggestive fragment from Aristophanes' Daitales, which shows clearly the part speech genres play in the dynamics of Aristophanic comedy. Because of the limitations of space and the abundance of examples the exposition will be fragmentary; nevertheless, the attempt will be worthwhile if it is able to indicate the shape that a more comprehensive interpretation of Old Comedy could take.
ACHARNIANS (425 BCE)
Dikaiopolis the Athenian is driven by the irresponsible behavior of his fellow citizens to make a separate peace treaty with the Spartans for himself and his family. His actions are detected, however, by the chorus of decrepit Acharnian farmers who hearken feebly back to the days of the Marathon-fighters, the Marathonomachai, and hate the Spartans for cutting their vines during their yearly depredations of the Attic countryside. They storm into the theater stones in hand, seeking to destroy the traitors. They are ludicrous, of course, and the effect is intensified by the contrast between their feebleness and their elevated diction, which is full of words like hodoiporon (205), “making my way” and froudos, “out of the way”. These words are common in tragedy but appear nowhere in comedy except where tragedy or its tone is parodied. The joke cuts two ways. Obviously, the choristers appear ridiculous by mouthing the highly artificial language of tragedy; in addition their diction bears some resemblance to that of the pursuing Furies in Aeschylus' Eumenides. But Aristophanes' aged “Furies” have seen better days. Tragic language itself is devalued by having its extreme artificiality, invisible on the purely tragic stage, revealed by the incongruity of Aristophanes' comic deployment.24
The parody of tragedy is a major feature of most Aristophanic comedies. In the Acharnians, however, Aristophanes' parody of Euripides' Telephus (now lost) structures a large part of the play. Telephus was a king whose leg, wounded at the hands of Achilles, would not heal without help from his Greek enemies. In Euripides' play, produced in 438 BCE, about fifteen years earlier than the Acharnians, Telephus comes to Agamemnon's palace dressed as a beggar, and sneaks in among the assembled Greek leaders to plead his case. To tragic audiences accustomed to magnificent costumes in the plays of Aeschylus, the sight of a king in rags was apparently memorable, and to some it must have seemed already a travesty of tragedy's necessary dignity. In the Acharnians, however, the Telephus-parody holds center stage and operates at many different levels (Foley 1993).
Before attempting to pacify the sullen Acharnians Dikaiopolis visits the workshop of Euripides, hoping to elicit pity from the farmers by dressing in some of the pathetic ragged costumes Euripides keeps around for his heroes. The tragedian is compliant at first, suggesting the costumes of his various ragged heroes, and finally agreeing to part with the rags of King Telephus. Euripides' patience is strained, however, by Dikaiopolis' insistence that he receive Telephus' props as well, the felt hat, his beggar's staff, the basket burnt through by a lamp, and finally — the last straw for the now-exasperated Euripides — a few leaves, a bunch of herbs, and a homely drinking jar with a crack plugged by a little sponge (410–479). Dikaiopolis leaves as Euripides laments the loss of his entire tragic repertoire. Unlike the “chopping block scene” described below, this scene from Acharnians has no parallel in the play of Euripides, beyond the recollection of the specific items used, or at least referred to, in the original.25 Through the requests of Dikaiopolis Aristophanes dissects the stage properties of the Euripidean hero and transforms them entirely — before the eyes of the tragic playwright himself — who is co-opted and forced to play a leading role in the farce. Whereas in the original Telephus the ragged costume of the hero (however surprising to the audience it may have been initially) had to be accepted at face value, since the tragedy offered no alternate context from which to view the action, here the critical view of Dikaiopolis, juxtaposed with his expectation of tragic grandeur, brings about an implicit re-evaluation of Euripides, his hero, and his play.
Dikaiopolis emphasizes the lack of nobility in the Euripidean theater by drawing attention to the homely props of its heroes. The effect of this juxtaposition is intensified by his diction, as all of his requests are uttered using the diminutive of familiar, wheedling speech to specify the object sought, e.g. pilidion “little cap” (Ach. 439) instead of pilos, “cap”, rhakion, “raglet” (Ach. 415) in place of rhake, “rags”.26 Not only is the unworthiness of the objects themselves noted, then, but they are also described in the least elevated terms possible. These diminutives thus offer a striking contrast to the grandiloquent tragic diction preferred by Euripides in the play (e.g. 418–119; see also the exchange at 396–400) and further contribute to his ridiculous appearance. Dikaiopolis' diction appears to operate on another level as well. Frogs 1203: “kôidarion kai lekuthion kai thulakion”, (“fleecelet, flasklet and baglet”: Stanford 1958), ridicules Euripides not for his sophistic pomposity (as does, for example, Ach. 396) but for his own excessive use of diminutives. If we look at Dikaiopolis' diminutives in the light of this passage, in addition to mocking Euripides' lack of tragic solemnity, they draw attention to another of his stylistic mannerisms and contribute to the re-evaluation of his tragedy, as mentioned above. One could say as a result that the Acharnians takes Telephus, a king impersonating a beggar, and shows him to have been no better than a beggar all along. In the view of the play, Telephus' duplicitous entry into the palace of Agamemnon, as well as his ragged clothes and props, make it impossible for his royal dignity to be restored under any circumstances.
Like the humiliating injury of the general, Lamachus, later in the play and unlike that of Sophocles' Philoctetes, Telephus' wound is in no way ennobling. Rather, the wound, along with the king's entirely ridiculous demeanor, challenges the tacit assumption of Euripides that the Telephus-story possesses sufficient weight to appear on the tragic stage. Thus the Telephus-paxody of the Acharnians implicitly criticizes Euripides for his lack of decorum and demonstrates that his characters are just as comfortable on the set of a comedy. In a more general sense, however, Aristophanes' travesty of the Telephus removes the entire genre of tragedy from its previous position of unaccountability — in which it has no contact with comedy — and makes it subject to his gaze, within which it is shown to occupy a space that is wholly contingent, mannered, and thoroughly within the reach of comic criticism. Its parodic force brings about what Bakhtin attributes to the other serio-comic genres of antiquity, “the creation of a parodic decrowning double” (PDP, 127) able to infect all serious genres with the carnival sense of the world.
Acharnians maintains this evaluative position in regard to tragedy in the ensuing scenes. Dikaiopolis returns to meet his accusers, assuming the character of Telephus, who in the play of Euripides had compared his situation among the Greek leaders to that of a man speaking with an ax poised above his neck. In the Acharnians, however, the comparison is literalized as Dikaiopolis actually offers to give a speech of defense with his head on a chopping-block. Thus the parody of the Telephus enters a new dimension with a new comic narrative calqued upon the old and articulated by a distorted version of the original play.27 Let us take the opening of Dikaiopolis' speech to the Acharnian farmers as an example:
mê moi fthonêsêt', andres hoi theômenoi,
ei ptôkhos ôn epeit' en Athênaiois legein
mellô peri tês poleos, trugôidian poion
[Do not be angry at me, spectators, if, though a beggar,
I intend to speak about the city before the Athenians,
while acting in a comedy.) (497–499)
This line, in addition to illustrating comedy's self-reflexive posture, parodies Telephus, fr. 701 Nauck, where the beggar/king tries to justify the ridiculousness of his outward appearance:
mê moi fthonêsêt', Andres Hellênôn akroi,
ei ptôkhos on tetlêk' en esthloisin legein.
[Do not be angry, leaders of the Greeks.
If, though a beggar, I dare to speak among noble men.]
On one level the Aristophanic substitutions are simple, since Dikaiopolis defending the Spartans before the Athenians is equivalent to Telephus' own defense of himself before the Greeks. In the end Dikaiopolis eventually wins over the cranky Acharnians, just as Telephus finally succeeded in convincing the hostile Greeks to help him (see Dobrov 1995). Yet on the linguistic level, the level of generic interaction, everyone but Aristophanes comes off a loser: Euripides, the Acharnian chorus, Dikaiopolis, and the Spartans.
Euripides is said to deprive tragedy of its grandeur with his ragged heroes, and so to expose it to this type of comic ridicule. The Acharnian chorus, who in the context of the parody listen to the speech of Dikaiopolis as Achilles, Agamemnon and Odysseus listened to King Telephus, can only appear more ridiculous in this heroic role, for their feebleness contrasts pointedly with the greatness of their parodic analogues. Finally, Dikaiopolis and the Spartans are ridiculous in the most obvious sense, since they play the part of, and are represented by, the beggarly King Telephus, whose juxtaposition of poverty, symbolized by his ragged costume, and royal power makes him a walking oxymoron. At the same time, the literal intrusion of comedy as a genre into the parody at line 499 (trugôidian poiôn) reminds us that Aristophanes has set comedy up as the arbiter of this contest, in place of tragic seriousness. Bakhtin's description of the deployment of multiple languages in the novel is particularly appropriate in the context of this passage: “Here the dialogic nature of heteroglossia is revealed and actualized; languages become implicated in each other and mutually annihilate each other” (DN, 410). Thus the presence of tragic language in Aristophanes' comic text has a dynamic effect on everyone, yet the contest is organized so as to leave Aristophanic comedy alone holding the field in the end. Such an inversion of the traditional positions of tragedy and comedy, moreover, is perfectly comprehensible within Bakhtin's account of the “carnivalization of literature” effected by the numerous parodic-travestying forms of serio-comic literature, a tradition within which, as we have shown, Aristophanes plays a major role.
DAITALES 205
I would like to continue by looking at the first six lines of a fragment from Aristophanes lost play the Daitales, or Banqueters. This passage is exemplary not simply because it illustrates well the way comedy appropriates the speech genres of fifth-century Athenian institutions and political life, but because unlike other passages it calls attention to the unspoken connotations of the speech upon which it relies. If it does not offer to us a complete key to its interpretation, its existence points to the presence of a language of comic association nevertheless inherent in it and usually obscured from our view.
The Daitales was produced in 427 BCE28 Unfortunately, it has not survived except in a few fragments preserved in the works of others. It was Aristophanes' first play and, to judge from remarks in the Clouds where the poet is compared to a young mother who gives up her offspring for adoption, its production was entrusted to another. Aristophanes himself might have been only in his late teens at this time, but he was already embarking upon some of the themes that would serve him well in his later plays. The play concerns intergenerational conflict represented on two levels, first by a father of the old school and his dissolute, rhetorical, luxurious, “Euripidizing” son, second by the conflict between two brothers, one the reprobate mentioned above, the other orderly and moderate. Thus the play treated themes explicitly engaged in the Clouds, where the debate between the Just and Unjust speeches is superimposed on the conflict between Strepsiades, the old-fashioned lover of Aeschylus, and his son Pheidippides, who comes to practise the new education with its contempt for everything old, and its admiration for rhetorical paradox and the scandalous characters of Euripidean tragedy.29
The name Daitales refers to the composition of the chorus. They are fellow revelers, those who have shared in a sacrificial meal, according to some sources in the temple of Heracles, a well known figure of gluttony in comedy. They are thus like the parasitoid, fellow eaters, referred to in fifth-century Athenian decrees. Alternately, it has been proposed that the title is a demotic, identifying the chorus as residents of the imaginary deme Daitale, “Party Town”. Either way the chorus members are regular participants in these festive celebrations, as would be expected of anyone bearing this suggestive address. One might speculate that the role of the chorus in the play is parallel to that of the choruses of the Knights and the Wasps, who begin the respective plays as defenders of the status quo to which they are indebted for their alleged privileges, but are converted to a new way of thinking when the status quo is shown to have exploited them for the benefit of others.
The fragment is as follows:
A: all' ei sorellê kai muron kai tainiai.
B: idou sorellê; touto para Lusistratou.
A: ê mên isês su katapligêsêi têi chronêi.
B: to; katapligêsêi touto para tên rhêtorên.
A: apobêsetai soi tauta poi ta rhêmata.
B: par' Alkibiadou touto tapobêsetai.
[A: You're a corpse ready for the grave!
B: “Corpse?” listen to you! You sound like Lysistratus!
A: Or maybe you'll be trampled on by time!
B: That “trampled on” is straight out of the politicians!
A: These expressions will succeed for you!
B: Alcibiades is the source for that “will succeed”!]
(K-A, fr. 205)
In a lively exchange reminiscent of disputes between fathers and sons in Clouds and Wasps, the first speaker, apparently the wayward son, calls his father “corpse”. We are accustomed to the presence of invective in Aristophanes. The scholiast explains sorellê, “corpse”, as a joke directed against old men. The related word sows, coffin, appears frequently in comedy also as an abusive epithet of the aged, the same men who are also referred to as Kronos and Tithonus by their adversaries who find them hopelessly decrepit (see also Shipp 1944). The resonance of sorellê goes further, however, as the father's reference to Lysistratus shows. Not much is known of Lysistratus. He is mocked in the Knights and Acharnians for his impoverished condition, but in the Acharnians and also in the Wasps he appears in the company of the Athenian elite: Cleon, Hyperbolus, Cleonymos, and the like. What then does the father mean by his words? Clearly, he suggests that his effete son is modeling his rhetoric on that of Lysistratus and, as will appear, on that of other public figures as well. Just as in the case of the tragic parody discussed above, this mockery cuts two ways. Most obviously, the father shows up his son by exposing his affected diction, but Lysistratus is also ridiculed for his way of speaking which, thus enunciated, ceases to be the speech of a unique individual and becomes a rhetorical cliché with little power to move a savvy listener. The precise affectation of Lysistratus' speech is more difficult to determine. Sorellê is a very rare word, appearing only here in this fragment of Aristophanes and in the grammarians who cite it. It is not difficult to imagine, however, that in a period like the late fifth century, in which the old standards of morality, piety and behavior were under scrutiny, at least rhetorically, by the sophists and their students, sorellê could have been a loaded term, pan of the rhetoric which publicly supported the adherents of the new education in the ongoing battle between forces that styled themselves as old and new. It may be attributed to Lysistratus simply to represent his presumed adherence to the “new morality” which, in the Clouds at least, allows sons to strike their fathers and openly look forward to their deaths. Such hypotheses, however plausible, admittedly are beyond proof. What is important, however, is that the exchange between father and son assumes that there is a secondary significance to sorellê in addition to its literal one. This secondary significance links the word to the world beyond the play, and although it creates complications impossible for us to unravel, it offered inteipretive possibilities to the Athenian audience who came to the theater with a sophisticated knowledge of speech genres.
This pattern established in the first exchange between father and son continues in the rest of the fragment. A threat by the young man is followed by a belittling response that exposes the fact that the son's rhetoric is wholly predictable and derived from sources known to the father and to at least part of the audience. The son predicts that his father will be trampled on by time. The old man has heard it all before. “Your ‘get trampled on’,” he says, “is straight out of the orators.” Their word for “get trampled on”, kataplissesthai, is rare and appears nowhere else in Aristophanes. Plissesthai, however, occurs in Homer and Archilochus. Its appearance here therefore points to a practice of epic affectation among the orators and their imitators (Hope 1905, 49). Alternatively, a more contemporary set of associations is possible. The related compound apoplissesthai, “trot off”, appears in the Acharnians (218) and is associated in the scholiastic tradition with the Spartan word plix, “step”. If this association is correct, then the Chorus' use of it could possibly be connected to the well-articulated suspicions of philo-spartan behavior among elements of the Athenian aristocracy in fifth-century Athens (Carter 1986, 52–75).
Such interpretations are admittedly speculative. Nevertheless, the sort of ultra-sensitivity to language connotations, especially antidemocratic ones, implied by both interpretations is not out of place in Aristophanic comedy at all. This can be demonstrated by the passage in Wasps (488–499) where Bdelycleon complains that the chorus are a bunch of saps who have fallen for the Attic tendency to shout “tyranny” at the slightest provocation. His slave, Xanthias, agrees and recounts a recent visit to a prostitute when he asked her to straddle him — the Greek is kelêtizein from kelês, “riding horse”. On the basis of this request, the prostitute recoils and accuses Xanthias of trying to restore the tyranny of Hippias, the son of Pisistratus, and tyrant of Athens in the late sixth century. The name Hippias is, of course, derived from hippos, “horse”, and is therefore connected by a very indirect association with kelêtizein, the sexual position preferred by Bdelycleon's slave. Thus, in the atmosphere of democratic paranoia which Aristophanes is satirizing, the common “horse” element in the description of a sexual posture and in the name of a tyrant dead for almost a century becomes the basis for an accusation that the customer is planning an oligarchic coup.30
The rhetorical climax of Aristophanes' linguistic drama brings an innocuous-looking retort from the son: “These expressions will succeed for you.” If the text is correct his word for “succeed” is apobêsetai. But the father believes himself no fool: “Alcibiades is the source for that ‘will succeed’,” he sneers. Unlike sorellê and kataplissesthai, the verb apobainein is by no means an uncommon word, appearing regularly in fifth-century authors. Alcibiades, however, is no stranger to comedy or to public speaking. He appears in numerous fragments of the Greek comic poets and in the extant plays of Aristophanes, where everything in his life from his sexual exploits to his lisping affectations is mocked. Plutarch's Life of Alcibiades (10, 4) comments on allusions to his public-speaking abilities. Likewise, in the Acharnians (714–718) the chorus longs for a new judicial dispensation under which the old will prosecute the old and leave to the young men “the wide-assed chattering son of Kleinias” (Alcibiades), whose verbal dexterity is trivialized by the use of the adjective lalos, “chattering”.31 This passage from the Acharnians is particularly significant for the understanding of Daitales 205, as it links the ultra-aristocratic Alcibiades not just with public speaking but with the rhetorical practices of what could at least be comically described as “the younger generation”. A little earlier the chorus of Acharnians had complained about being laughed at by young speakers (rhêtores, the group identified by the father as the source of line 3). They had also painted the pathetic picture of an old Marathon-fighter dragged into court and mumbling his speech as he tried to defend himself against a young zealot eager to pelt him with phrases, as well as with finely-shaved slivers of words (685–688). His “phrases” (rhêmata) picks up the same word used to describe the allegedly Alcibiadean jargon of Daitales 205.5, thus suggesting a parallelism between Alcibiades and the unscrupulous rhêtores. The lament of the chorus continues with the introduction of another shaver of words, the “chattering prosecutor Cephisodemus”, who, they say, prosecuted old Thucydides, the rival of Pericles, after his return from exile. The chorus concludes with the reference to Alcibiades mentioned earlier (“the wide-assed chattering son of Kleinias”). As in the Daitales fragment he clearly represents the rhetorical climax of the passage, for he is both a chatterer (lalos) like Cephisodemus as well as the scourge of the verbally-challenged older generation. Thus the connection between Alcibiades and a certain newfangled, intimidating type of public speaking seems firmly established. The provenance of the son's apobaimein in Daiteles 205, and its precise connection to Alcibiades, will probably never be known. However, its use in the fragment, supplemented by the references in the Acharnians to the new oratory of Alcibiades and his ilk, suggests that it is a part of the lexicon of rhêmata developed by the public speakers of the younger generation and seen as characteristic of Alcibiades in particular.
Daiteles 205 gives a hint of the power of Old Comedy to subject all sorts of people and practices to its scrutiny by bringing on stage the languages and practices of each. Comedy stages the dialogization of these voices, contextualizing them, and asserting its own priority in the ongoing struggle for recognition in the polis. It would be interesting to be able to establish more precisely the intricate pattern of allusion and satire that is implied by the diction of Daitales 205. Nevertheless, what we have gleaned from the formidable obscurities of the fragment is just as important for the study of Old Comedy. Words like sorellê, apoplissesthai, and apobainein would normally be taken at face value, as parts of a representational system that linked words and the things they represent in a one-to-one relationship. Yet the responses of the father draw attention to an aspect of the son's speech that the son would have preferred to leave hidden: sorellê is not only a dead body and a term of abuse directed against the aged; it is also keyed to another set of language codes that have their home elsewhere in the speech of men like Lysistratus and Alcibiades, as well as in the various professions, literary texts and genres, and the entire panoply of other social relations. Like all rhetorical moves it works best when it is invisible and the speech of the father, which brings it into the light of the public gaze, robs it of much of its effectiveness.32
IV. CONCLUSION
The relevance of Bakhtin's thought to Arislophanic comedy has often seemed obvious to scholars. It is perhaps for this reason that it has not received the intensive treatment required by the problems it raises, particularly Bakhtin's explicit remarks about Aristophanes' place within his “History of Laughter”. In analyzing this issue, I have attempted to contextuahze Bakhtin's view of carnival within his view of the ancient world and of human anthropology in general in an attempt to show the intellectual conditions under which the exclusion of Aristophanes makes sense. If carnival literature is by definition a reaction against authority, as Bakhtin repeatedly suggests, then unless Aristophanic comedy is viewed as subversive, in his view it cannot be called a fully carnivalized genre. Yet as we have seen Bakhtin saw the classical period in mythical terms, as characterized by a “harmonious interaction of the genres”, in which literary genres do not intrude on each other. This reductive view of generic interaction is not tenable in the light of contemporary research on ancient Greek literature, but it nevertheless represents an important structural component of Bakhtin's carnivalistic model and helps to account for his otherwise inexplicable neglect of Aristophanes.
I have argued that Aristophanic comedy can be approached more profitably from a Bakhtinian perspective by concentrating less on Bakhtin's theoretical description of carnival and more on his description of the novel, with its characteristic use of heteroglossia. This tactic is promising because it allows us to shift the focus of the debate on Bakhtin and Aristophanes from the controversial question of comedy's ritual origins to the fluid movement within the plays from one speech genre or language level to another, a subject concerning which there is no shortage of concrete material. I have attempted to give an account of some of these interactions in Aristophanic comedy, and to describe the destabilizing effect their presence has on attempts to assign to the plays a single meaning which is not undermined or explicitly contested elsewhere. The result of these investigations, it seems to me, is the appearance of links and connotations that at a distance of 2400 years would otherwise be invisible to us. This double-voicedness is an integral part of comic technique, as the fragment from the Daitales shows. Its explicit assignment of otherwise unremarkable words to the characteristic speech of individuals and types, a phenomenon that we experience countless times daily in our own cultures, publicizes the ambivalence of comic language in precisely the sense that Bakhtin describes the workings of novelistic discourse. Its hilarity does not lie for the most part in its expression of the primitive carnival spirit of joyful release and Saturnalian reversal. It is far too literary, as Bakhtin saw. Nevertheless, the sophisticated intertextuality that it employs, together with its attempt to position itself as a master genre, the only one capable of comprehending all others, makes it an important predecessor of the novelistic consciousness he describes.
NOTES
1. For a fuller account see Morson and Emerson 1990, 433–470; Holquist 1990, 88–89; Anchor 1985, 239–240. In connection with Aristophanes see also Edwards 1993, 89–117. See also RW, 19–20.
2. Cf. the Bakhtinian summary of Rabelais given by Clark and Holquist: “Rabelais' work is infamous for its breaches of ‘good taste’, its weird confluence of learned allusion and scatological detail, the willful intermingling of medical, technological, and highbrow, self-consciously literary vocabularies with the crudest billingsgate” (1984, 296). See Miller in this volume for the importance of this aspect of Rabelais' work throughout his oeuvre, even in elevated contexts.
3. For a summary, in the context of a more nuanced attempt to describe the ritual context of comedy, see Bowie 1993, 5–7. For a more favorable appraisal of Cornford with useful correctives, see Reckford 1987, esp. 36–45.
4. See Pollard 1948 for a mid-century critique.
5. As Michael Holquist points out, “The Formalist definition of ‘literariness’ depended on an approach to language at the level of stylistics” (Holquist 1990. 70). Bakhtin's attitude toward the “literariness” of Aristophanes is also a part of his reaction against what he viewed as the Formalist reduction of linguistic analysis to personal stylistics: for Bakhtin's polemical summary of the state of contemporary stylistics, see DN, 160–275.
6. At the same time Bakhtin confronts a double bind: how to maintain that the “ancient matrix” of carnival culture has been simultaneously lost and preserved. Bakhtin's resolution of this question, to be understood from his essay on the prehistory of novelistic discourse and the 1963 edition of the Dostoevsky book, is his conception of the serio-comic genres in antiquity and the Middle Ages. His concentration on the role of minor genres in this process, however, turns the preservation of carnival laughter into a kind of secret history, a subterranean force operating beneath the surface of official culture, yet carrying with it the keys to the authentic representation of human experience. My own argument seeks a less conspiratorial view of literary history, and, assuming that language is always in flux — a point on which Bakhtin would, of course, concur — focuses on the degree to which Aristophanes accelerates its development and change through his “orchestration” of its divergent voices.
7. For the most recent evaluation of Bakhtin's work on the Greek novel, see Nimis 1994.
8. For a description of the revisions to the Dostoevsky book, see Morson and Emerson 1990, 456–460. For carnival as a subject of interest for Bakhtin in his late work, see N70, 132. See also Miller and Platter 1993.
9. For carnival as an ancient oppositional mode of thought, separate from any attempt by the official world to exploit it as a means of political control, see Holquist 1984, xviii: “Carnival must not be confused with mere holiday or, least of all, with self-serving festivals fostered by governments, secular or theocratic. The sanction for carnival derives ultimately not from a calendar prescribed by church or state, but from a force that preexists priests and kings and to whose superior power they are actually deferring when they appear to be licensing carnival.”
10. Bakhtin's sense of carnival as a part of human anthropology is largely hypothetical. Its strongest justifications are to be found only in the observable features of later literature. Just as nineteenth-century philology began the hypothetical reconstruction of Indo-European based on the observable similarities of subsequent national languages, so Bakhtin imagines a prehistory of carnival on the basis of its later shape as a literary form.
11. It is a special type of expose, however. Cf. PDP, 126: “If carnivalistic ambivalence should happen to be extinguished in these images of decrowning, they degenerated into a purely negative exposê of a moral or socio-political sort, they became single-leveled, lost their artistic character, and were transformed into naked journalism.”
12. Thus the burlesque of mythology is a pre-eminent serio-comic genre, a fact that I will return to in the context of Old Comedy. Its purpose, however, is not simple negation of the heroic world but a contextualization of it through the destruction of epic distance (PND, 55). For the positive power of this phenomenon see Bakhtin's remarks on profanation, which he refers to as consisting of “a whole series of carnivalistic debasings and bringing down to earth, carnivalistic obscenities linked with the reproductive power of the earth and the body, carnivalistic parodies on sacred texts and sayings” (PDP, 123).
13. “In all these forms the germs of novelistic prose can be found, that is, there is an orchestration of meaning through heteroglossia” (DN, 371).
14. In Aristotelian terms one could say that the first two represent formal causes of serio-comic novelness while the third, stylistic heteroglossia, is its material cause.
15. Cf. PND, 66–67: “In the historical period of ancient Greek life — a period that was, linguistically speaking, stable and monoglottic — all plots, all subject and thematic materials, the entire basic stock of images, expressions and intonations, arose from within the very heart of the native language. Everything that entered from the outside (and that was a great deal) was assimilated in a powerful and confident environment of closed-off monoglossia, one that viewed the polyglossia of the barbarian world with contempt.”
16. I have discussed elsewhere (Platter 1993) what may be a perceived incompatibility for Bakhtin of the radical antinomianian spirit he attributes to carnival and the aggressively civic plays of Aristophanes.
17. For change in this respect over the course of the fifth century, see Stevens 1976.
18. They do not achieve it, however, for they encounter the same postlapsarian problem as do all other monologizing tendencies.
19. See also Thesmophoriazusae 870 = Peleus fr. 493 Radt 1977; cf. Dübner 1969, 270.
20. See Gantz 1993, 225–232, 688–689 for the different versions of the Peleus story in archaic and classical sources.
21. His unmanliness is stressed in the continuation of the passage, with the Unjust Speech's contention that Thetis left him because he wasn't hybristic enough to “stay awake all night” (pannukhizein) in bed with her (1068–1070).
22. Later in the play (1353–1376) Aeschylus is held up to similar ridicule when Pheidippides refuses to sing his poetry. The most prominent example of tragedy held up to scrutiny is of course the agon of the Frogs, where Aeschylus and Euripides weigh their respective lines against each other while the comic-Dionysus looks on.
23. See PND, 55: “Ancient parody was free of nihilistic denial. It was not, after all, the heroes who were parodied, nor the Trojan War and its participants; what was parodied was only its epic heroization; not Heracles and his exploits but their tragic heroization.”
24. For incongruity as a constituent principle of comedy, see Jernigan 1939. The fine distinction he makes between derisive and incongruous humor, however, cannot be defended. As Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia makes clear, the inescapable condition of polyglot genres is to destabilize any language capable of being regarded as official. Thus to be made to appear incongruous is to be derided.
25. Rau 1967. 36. Handley and Rea 1957, 29 take the view that nothing beyond the hat and traveler's staff needed to have appeared in the original play, a needlessly skeptical view that, as Gantz 1993, 579 points out, makes the specificity of Dikaiopolis' requests unintelligible. For a detailed analysis of Aristophanes' use of the Telephus see Dobrov 1995. See also Bowie 1993, 30–31: Hubbard 1991. 43–47; and Foley 1993.
26. See Peppier 1902, 9 for a full list and a discussion of the sociolinguistic context of diminutives in general. See also the scholiast on Ach. 439 (Dübner 1969, 15). See also baktêrion (Ach. 448) for baktêria, etc. These diminutives do not appear in tragedy.
27. See Handley and Rea 1957 for a fuller examination of the Telephus fragments.
28. See Russo 1994, 12–32 for a detailed discussion of the chronology of Aristophanes' early plays. He believes that the Daitales was performed at the City Dionysia.
29. Note also the parallelism between the comic moderation of the first son (ho sofrôn, Clouds 529) in the Daitales and that of Peleus in the Clouds, as discussed above.
30. Davidson discusses the earlier part of the Wasps passage, in which the purchase of fish is assumed to be tyrannical act, and argues that behind the joke lies not democratic paranoia but “a discourse about conspicuous consumption and, perhaps, of class divisions” (1993, 54). He is correct to see the consumption of fish as an indicator of social standing in fifth-century Athens and later. Nevertheless, the anecdote of the slave, Xanthias (see below), makes it clear that he understands his master's words to be an indictment of Athenian irrationality, not a description of the acuity of their inferences. See also Taillardat 1965, 242–243 and Carter 1986, 1 19–120.
31. For a reading of this the world of the Acharnian farmers and the Daitales passage as an expression of Athenian quietism, see Carter 1986, 119–121.
32. Cf Ach. 633–645, where the Chorus in the parabasis explicitly make the same claim in the name of the poet.
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